Beginning with New England and taking State by State in the usual geographical order, that of Maine for 1888 leads.  Work here was done by a special commissioner appointed for the purpose, and the chief towns and cities in the State were visited.  No occupation was excluded.  The foreign element of the State is comparatively small.  There is no city in which overcrowding and its results in the tenement-house system are to be found.  Factories are numerous, and the bulk of Maine working-women are found in them; the canning industry employs hundreds, and all trades have their proportion of workers.  For all of them conditions are better in many ways than at almost any other point in New England, many of them living at home and paying but a small proportion of their wages toward the family support.

A large proportion of the factories have boarding-houses attached, which are run by a contractor.  A full inspection of these was made, and the report pronounces them to be better kept than the ordinary boarding-house, with liberal dietary and comfortable rooms.  Many of the women owned their furniture, and had made “homes” out of the narrow quarters.  These were the better-paid class of workers.  Several of the factories have “Relief Associations,” in which the employees pay a small sum weekly, which secures them a fixed sum during illness or disability.  The conditions, as a whole, in factory are more nearly those of Massachusetts during the early days of the Lowell mills than can be found elsewhere.

Taking the State as a whole, though the average wage is nearly a dollar less a week than that of Massachusetts, its buying power is somewhat more, from the fact that rents are lower and the conditions of living simpler, though this is true only of remote towns.

Massachusetts follows; and here, as in Maine, there is general complaint that many of the girls live at home, pay little or no board, and thus can take a lower wage than the self-supporting worker.  In the large stores employees are hired at the lowest possible figure; and many girls who are working for from four to five dollars per week state that it is impossible to pay for room and board with even tolerably decent clothing.  Hundreds who want pin-money do work at a price impossible to the self-supporting worker, many married women coming under this head; and bitter complaint is made on this point.  At the best the wage is at a minimum, and only the most rigid economy renders it possible for the earner to live on it.  That there is not greater suffering reflects all honor on the army of hard-working women, pronounced by the commissioner to be as industrious, moral, and virtuous a class as the community owns.

“Homes” of every order have been established in Boston and in other large towns in the State; and as they give board at the lowest rate, they are filled with girls.  They are rigid as to rules and regulations, and not in favor, as a rule, with the majority.  A very slight relaxing of lines and more effort to make them cheerful would result in bringing many who now remain outside; but in any case they can reach but a small proportion.